Blair's fondest hope is that we will forget

On Wednesday the BBC must have created some kind of record when its political editor decided not to deal with the Budget, leaving that to somebody else, and spoke instead about another subject entirely, namely Iraq.

This may have proved a disappointment to the young woman who looks after my feet – disgusting thought! – and is in love with Mr Andrew Marr. I mean the thought of looking after my feet is disgusting, not that of her love for Mr Marr, whom she has never met but calls "Andrew". When I told her that I knew him, not intimately but reasonably well, my stock rose perceptibly, and I look forward to months of dedicated foot care, or until such time as she falls out of love with Andrew.

She had no reason for disappointment. He did, after all, put in an appearance on the screen. The disappointed man was Mr Gordon Brown. When somebody told one of his aides of the supposed fall of Baghdad, the young man said: "Damn." Seldom if, indeed, ever has a Budget been so eclipsed by external events.

Hugh Gaitskell's Budget during the Korean War, by contrast, aroused the highest interest. There were doubts about whether we could pay for the war. The Labour government's rearmament programme was a matter of the most acute controversy between the party establishment and the followers of Aneurin Bevan. The most recent research tends to show that Bevan and his friends were right after all.

There was nothing like that on Wednesday. Mr Brown airily disbursed to the armed forces a billion here, a billion there, and no one questioned whether we could afford it. Indeed, no one questioned whether we could afford anything. The Chancellor's whole performance was characterised by an untypical and maybe unjustified jauntiness. He was not telling us that all flesh was as grass and warning us of the wrath to come but trying to sell us a second-hand car.

No one took very much notice. The papers published supplements full of learned articles and those tables showing different figures, depending on the papers you read, which in any case never seem to fit exactly your own financial circumstances. Tax tables could never compete with the falling of a statue, however contrived an event this may have been and however poor a likeness the statue was: it seemed to me uncannily reminiscent of Lloyd George. Thursday's papers, or those that had supported the war, then indulged in an orgy of self-congratulation combined with a mild persecution of those who had opposed the invasion.

I was reminded of William Whitelaw, talking to my friend Frank Johnson and me on the prom at Brighton immediately after the end of an afternoon session of the Tory conference. It was in the 1970s. Labour was in power and itself in trouble with the miners, and Edward Heath (by now displaced as party leader) had made a speech urging his colleagues not to gloat. "Ted says we mustn't gloat," Whitelaw remarked, "wrong to gloat, mustn't do it, no, no, no. Well, I can tell you, I'm gloating like hell."

Likewise with Thursday's papers. They too were gloating like hell. But that was after the day of the statue. This was swiftly followed by the day of looting. No gloating now; rather, universal lamentation. The events seem to have taken the United States authorities completely by surprise, as much in Washington as in Baghdad itself, inasmuch as they exist at all in that now ruined city. But what did they expect? Exactly the same unsurprising phenomenon had taken place in Basra some days before, where the British troops had proved equally unable or unwilling to impede its progress.

Mr Tony Blair is content to repeat "Iraq for the Iraqis" in one form or another. He has also indicated that he is disinclined to follow Mr George Bush into Syria, Iran or wherever it is that the spirit next takes Mr Bush. Though one should never underestimate Mr Blair's urge to follow US foreign policy – it far exceeds that of, say, his two most enthusiastic predecessors, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher – he has probably now reached the stage of saying to Mr Bush: so far, and no further, in the politest way, of course. This is the minimum he needs to do to maintain his position in his party.

"Iraq for the Iraqis" is a good, populist cry, similarly, even if it is also the minimum he can get away with. But it is, when you come to examine it more closely, a means of evading responsibility. Thus a United Nations spokesman on Newsnight last Thursday was quite clear that Britain and America were now the occupying powers in Iraq and, as such, had various legal duties to perform to the indigenous population, including the maintenance both of public services and of law and order. When Mr Jeremy Paxman commented that this was his opinion, he replied sturdily that it was not his opinion at all, but was there in black and white in the Geneva Convention. Mr Blair's hope is, I suspect, that slowly we shall most of us forget about Iraq and turn our attention to other matters. Television will soon become bored: we all know that. The operation can then be presented to us as a great success. This has been Mr Blair's technique with Kosovo, with Afghanistan, with Sierra Leone. Yet few of us have much idea of what conditions are really like in those unhappy parts of the world.

Iraq may turn out differently. The cameras may be brought home but our boys may not be. After all, the troops are still in Northern Ireland, 34 years after being sent to Belfast to protect the Catholic population of that city. They were greeted with cups of tea, which soon gave way to stones, petrol bombs and, later, bullets.

Northern Ireland is composed of Catholics, Protestants and, no doubt, atheists and agnostics who, however, give little trouble. They all speak English: usually better English than that spoken by their protectors or invaders. Iraq is composed of Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims and Kurds who are Sunnis but not Arabs. There are various sub-groupings (Baghdad has, or had, a substantial Jewish population). They do not speak English. Our troops do not speak Arabic; still less do the Americans, who cannot be bothered to learn any foreign language ever.

As Mr Blair told the Labour conference of October 1994: "Our party: New Labour. Our mission: New Britain. New Britain. New Labour. New Britain. New Britain." The latest slogan is: "New Labour. New Iraq." But we cannot even decide what sort of bicameral legislature we want in this country, for the various proposals for reform of the Lords are all deliberately lost in the long grass. And how on earth do we think we can control Iraq, or a part of it, when we cannot even govern Northern Ireland?